Martin Heidegger is, perhaps, the most controversial philosopher of the twentieth-century. Little has been written on him or about his work and its significance for educational thought. This unique collection by a group of international scholars reexamines Heidegger's work and its legacy for educational thought.

Life and contributions of eminent philosophers from Andhra Pradesh, India.

In the winter of 1872, while still a young professor in Basel, having just published his first book, The Birth of Tragedy, Friedrich Nietzsche delivered a series of lectures entitled “On the Future of Our Educational Institutions.”1 These five lectures were well received at the time. It appears that Nietzsche intended to add two more lectures and to publish the whole series as a book. By the end of the year, however, the title of the series featured only as the (...) second title in his self-parodying essay, “Five Forwards to Five Unwritten Books.”2 The lectures remained unpublished during Nietzsche's lifetime…. (shrink)

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz is the self-proclaimed inventor of the binary system and is considered as such by most historians of mathematics and/or mathematicians. Really though, we owe the groundwork of today’s computing not to Leibniz but to the Englishman Thomas Harriot and the Spaniard Juan Caramuel de Lobkowitz, whom Leibniz plagiarized. This plagiarism has been identified on the basis of several facts: Caramuel’s work on the binary system is earlier than Leibniz’s, Leibniz was acquainted—both directly and indirectly—with Caramuel’s work and (...) Leibniz had a natural tendency to plagiarize scientific works. (shrink)

Leading philosopher of religion D. Z. Phillips argues that intellectuals need not see their task as being for or against religion, but as one of understanding it. What stands in the way of this task are certain methodological assumptions about what enquiry into religion must be. Beginning with Bernard Williams on Greek gods, Phillips goes on to examine these assumptions in the work of Hume, Feuerbach, Marx, Frazer, Tylor, Marett, Freud, Durkheim, Le;vy-Bruhl, Berger and Winch. The result exposes confusion, but (...) also gives logical space to religious belief without advocating personal acceptance of that belief, and shows how the academic study of religion may return to the contemplative task of doing conceptual justice to the world. Religion and the Hermeneutics of Contemplation extends in important ways D. Z. Phillips' seminal 1976 book Religion Without Explanation. It will be of interest to scholars and students of philosophy, anthropology, sociology and theology. (shrink)

We propose a kernel method for using combinations of features across example pairs in learning pairwise classifiers. Pairwise classifiers, which identify whether two examples belong to the same class or not, are important components in duplicate detection, entity matching, and other clustering applications. Existing methods for learning pairwise classifiers from labeled training data are based on string edit distance or common features between two examples. However, if two examples from the same class have few common features, these methods have difficulties (...) in finding these pairs and achieving high recall. One typical example is to check whether two abbreviated author names in different citations refer to the same person or not. Since similarities between examples from the same class become close to zero, classifiers fail to distinguish positive pairs from negative pairs. One approach to avoiding the problem of zero similarities is using conjunctions of different features across examples, but implementing this idea straightforwardly makes the computational cost prohibitive for practical problems. Using a kernel on pair instances, our method can use feature conjunctions across examples without actually doing feature mappings, which are computationally expensive. The kernel is a tensor product of two inner products on the original feature space. The corresponding feature mapping generates conjunctions of features only across the two different examples while that of the conventional polynomial kernel also generates conjunctions of features from the same example, which are irrelevant to pairwise classification and cause deterioration of accuracy. Our experiments on the author matching problem show that this method can give a precision 4 to 8 times higher than that of previous methods at medium recall levels. (shrink)

In this paper I respond to Robert Taylor's argument that a Rawlsian framework does not support strong affirmative action programs. The paper makes three main arguments. The first disputes Taylor's claim that strong AA would not be needed in ideal conditions. Private racial discrimination, I suggest, might still exist in such conditions, so strong AA might be needed there. The second challenges Taylor's claims that pure procedural justice constrains Rawlsian nonideal theory. I argue that this rests on a fetishizing of (...) pure procedural justice that is absent from Rawls's work. I also show that a revised formulation of Taylor's concern here also fails. My third argument makes a positive Rawlsian case for strong AA in nonideal conditions that builds on a Taylor concession. Taylor suggests that the goal of nonideal theory is to create a world in which ideal theory can be applied. My argument begins by showing that another permissible goal of Rawlsian nonideal theory is to ameliorate injustice. I then argue that Rawls's contractualist framework supports the strongest forms of AA when category 3 interventions are blocked. (shrink)

This is a study of a crucial and controversial topic in metaphysics and the philosophy of science: the status of the laws of nature. D. M. Armstrong works out clearly and in comprehensive detail a largely original view that laws are relations between properties or universals. The theory is continuous with the views on universals and more generally with the scientific realism that Professor Armstrong has advanced in earlier publications. He begins here by mounting an attack on the orthodox and (...) sceptical view deriving from Hume that laws assert no more than a regularity of coincidence between instances of properties. In doing so he presents what may become the definitive statement of the case against this position. Professor Armstrong then goes on to establish his own theory in a systematic manner defending it against the most likely objections, and extending both it and the related theory of universals to cover functional and statistical laws. This treatment of the subject is refreshingly concise and vivid: it will both stimulate vigorous professional debate and make an excellent student text. (shrink)

Engaging Polanyi’s embeddedness–disembeddedness framework, this study explored the work experiences of Bhil children employed in Indian Bt cottonseed GPNs. The innovative visual technique of drawings followed by interviews was used. Migrant children, working under debt bondage, underwent greater exploitation and perennial and severe depersonalized bullying, indicative of commodification of labour and disembeddedness. In contrast, children working in their home villages were not under debt bondage and underwent less exploitation and occasional and mild depersonalized bullying, indicative of how civil society organizations, (...) along with the state, attempt to re-embed economic activities in the social context. Polanyi’s double movement was evident. ‘Place’ emerged as the pivotal factor determining children’s experiences. A ‘protective alliance’ of community controls and social power, associated with in-group affiliations and cohesive ties, stemming from a common village and tribal identity, aided children working at home for Bhil farmers. ‘Asymmetric intergroup inequality’ due to pronounced social identity and class differences, coupled with locational constraints and developmental disadvantage, made migrant children vulnerable targets. Social embeddedness influences how child workers are treated because it forces employers to be ethical and not engage in bullying. However, by shifting production to children’s home villages, there is an attempt to obscure the difference between child labour and child work. Thus, the seeds of disembeddedness are sown through the very act of re-embeddeding, potentially hampering future interventions. (shrink)

This article is a preliminary presentation of conjunctive paraconsistency, the claim that there might be non-explosive true contradictions, but contradictory propositions cannot be considered separately true. In case of true ‘p and not p’, the conjuncts must be held untrue, Simplification fails. The conjunctive approach is dual to non-adjunctive conceptions of inconsistency, informed by the idea that there might be cases in which a proposition is true and its negation is true too, but the conjunction is untrue, Adjunction fails. While (...) non-adjunctivism is a well-known option, the other view is not so much studied nowadays, but it was not unknown in the tradition, and there are some positive suggestions, in recent literature, that the position is plausible and deserves to be developed. The article compares conjunctivism, non-adjunctivism and dialetheism, then focuses on some possible justifications, costs and benefits of the conjunctive view. (shrink)

In this short text, a distinguished philosopher turns his attention to one of the oldest and most fundamental philosophical problems of all: How it is that we are able to sort and classify different things as being of the same natural class? Professor Armstrong carefully sets out six major theories—ancient, modern, and contemporary—and assesses the strengths and weaknesses of each. Recognizing that there are no final victories or defeats in metaphysics, Armstrong nonetheless defends a traditional account of universals as the (...) most satisfactory theory we have.This study is written for advanced students, but as Armstrong goes considerably beyond his earlier work on this topic, it will interest professional scholars as well. Carefully plotted and clearly written, Universals is both a paradigm of exposition and a case study on the value of careful analysis of fundamental issues in philosophy. (shrink)

Truths are determined not by what we believe, but by the way the world is. Or so realists about truth believe. Philosophers call such theories correspondence theories of truth. Truthmaking theory, which now has many adherents among contemporary philosophers, is the most recent development of a realist theory of truth, and in this book D. M. Armstrong offers the first full-length study of this theory. He examines its applications to different sorts of truth, including contingent truths, modal truths, truths about (...) the past and the future, and mathematical truths. In a clear, even-handed and non-technical discussion he makes a compelling case for truthmaking and its importance in philosophy. His book marks a significant contribution to the debate and will be of interest to a wide range of readers working in analytical philosophy. (shrink)

This dissertation lays the foundation for a new theory of non-relational intentionality. The thesis is divided into an introduction and three main chapters, each of which serves as an essential part of an overarching argument. The argument yields, as its conclusion, a new account of how language and thought can exhibit intentionality intrinsically, so that representation can occur in the absence of some thing that is represented. The overarching argument has two components: first, that intentionality can be profi tably studied (...) through examination of the semantics of intensional transitive verbs (ITVs), and second, that providing intensional transitive verbs with a nonrelational semantics will serve to provide us with (at least the beginnings of) a non-relational theory of intentionality. This approach is a generalization of Anscombe's views on perception. Anscombe held that perceptual verbs such as "see" and "perceive" were ITVs, and that understanding the semantics of their object positions could help us to solve the problems of hallucination and illusion, and provide a theory of perception more generally. I propose to apply this strategy to intentional states and the puzzles of intentionality more generally, and so Anscombe's influence will be felt all through the dissertation. -/- In the first chapter, titled "Semantic Verbs are Intensional Transitives", I argue that semantic verbs such as "refers to", "applies to", and "is true of" have all of the features of intensional transitive verbs, and discuss the consequences of this claim for semantic theory and the philosophy of language. One theoretically enriching consequence of this view is that it allows us to perspicuously express, and partially reconcile two opposing views on the nature and subject-matter of semantics: the Chomskian view, on which semantics is an internalistic enterprise concerning speakers' psychologies, and the Lewisian view, on which semantics is a fully externalistic enterprise issuing in theorems about how the world must look for our natural language sentences to be true. Intensional Transitive Verbs have two readings: a de dicto reading and a de re reading; the de dicto reading of ITVs is plausibly a nonrelational reading, and the intensional features peculiar to this reading make it suitable for expressing a Chomskian, internalist semantic program. On the other hand, the de re reading is fully relational, and make it suitable for expressing the kinds of word-world relations essential to the Lewisian conception of semantics. And since the de dicto and de re readings are plausibly related as two distinct scopal readings of the very same semantic postulates, we can see these two conceptions of semantics as related by two scopal readings of the very same semantic postulates. -/- In chapter two, titled "Hallucination and the New Problem of Empty Names", I argue that the problem of hallucination and the problem of empty names are, at bottom, the same problem. I argue for this by reconstructing the problem of empty names in way that is novel, but implicit in much of the discussion on empty names. I then show how, once recast in this light, the two problems are structurally identical down to an extremely fine level of granularity, and also substantially overlap in terms of their content. If the problems are identical in the way I propose, then we should expect that their spaces of solutions are also identical, and there is signi cant support for this conclusion. However, there are some proposed solutions to the problem of hallucination that have been overlooked as potential solutions to the problem of empty names, and this realization opens new non-relational approaches to the problem of empty names, and to the nature of meaning more generally. -/- In chapter three, titled "Intensionality is Additional Phrasal Unity", I argue for a novel approach to the semantics of intensional contexts. At the heart of my proposal is the Quinean view that intensional contexts should, from the perspective of the semantics, be treated as units, with the material in them contributing to the formation of a single predicate. However, this proposal is subject to a number of objections, including the criticism that taken at face value, this would render intensional contexts, which seem to be fully productive, non-compositional. I begin by discussing the concept of the unity of the phrase, and pointing to various ways that phrases can gain additional unity. I then proposes that the intensionality of intensional transitive verbs is best construed as a form of semantic incorporation; ITVs, on their intensional readings, meet all of the criteria for qualifying as incorporating the nominals in their object positions. I then give a semantics for ITVs that builds on existing views of the semantics of incorporation structures, and gesture at how this can be extended to intensional clausal verbs, including the so-called propositional attitude verbs. (shrink)

This collection of ten essays offers the first systematic assessment of Jü rgen Habermas's "Philosophical Discourse of Modernity," a book that defended the rational potential of the modern age against the depiction of modernity as a spent epoch. The essays (of which four are newly commissioned, five were published in the journal "Praxis International," and one -- by Habermas -- first appeared in translation in "New Critique" ) are divided into two sections: "Critical Rejoinders" and "Thematic Reformulations." An opening essay (...) by d'Entrè ves sets out the main issues and orients the debate between Habermas and the postmodernists by identifying two different senses of responsibility: a responsibility to act versus a responsibility to otherness (an openness to difference, dissonance, and ambiguity). These are linked with two alternative understandings of the primary function of language: action-orienting versus world-disclosing. This is a fruitful way of looking at the issues that Habermas has raised in his attempt to resurrect and complete the project of Enlightenment. Habermas's essay discusses the main themes of his book in the context of a critical engagement with neoconservative cultural and political trends. The main body of essays offer an interesting collection of points of view, for and against Habermas's position by philosophers, social scientists, intellectual historians, and literary critics. SECTIONS &; CONTRIBUTORS: "Introduction," Maurizio Passerin d'Entrè ves. "Modernity versus Postmodernity," Jü rgen Habermas. Critical Rejoinders: Fred Dallmayr. Christopher Norris. David C. Hoy. James Schmidt. Joel Whitebook. ThematicReformulations: James Bohman. Diana Coole. Jay M. Bernstein. David Ingram. (shrink)

A wide-ranging study of the central concepts in epistemology - belief, truth and knowledge. Professor Armstrong offers a dispositional account of general beliefs and of knowledge of general propositions. Belief about particular matters of fact are described as structures in the mind of the believer which represent or 'map' reality, while general beliefs are dispositions to extend the 'map' or introduce casual relations between portions of the map according to general rules. 'Knowledge' denotes the reliability of such beliefs as representations (...) of reality. Within this framework Professor Armstrong offers a distinctive account of many of the main questions in general epistemology - the relations between beliefs and language, the notions of proposition, concept and idea, the analysis of truth, the varieties of knowledge, and the way in which beleifs and knowledge are supported by reasons. The book as a whole if offered as a contribution to a naturalistic account of man. (shrink)

Argues that a set is the mereological whole of the singleton sets of its members (following Lewis's Parts of Classes), and that the singleton set of X is the state of affairs of X's having some unit-making property.

In this paper I show that we have strong empirical and theoretical reasons to treat the verbs we use in our semantic theorizing—particularly ‘refers to ’, ‘applies to ’, and ‘is true of ’—as intensional transitive verbs. Stating our semantic theories with intensional vocabulary allows us to partially reconcile two competing approaches to the nature and subject-matter of semantics: the Chomskian approach, on which semantics is non-relational, internalistic, and concerns the psychology of language users, and the Lewisian approach, on which (...) semantics is fully relational, specifies truth-conditions, and has metaphysical implications. ITVs have two readings: an intensional, de dicto reading, and a relational, de re reading. A semantic theory stated with the de dicto readings of our semantic verbs captures the core insights of the Chomskian approach to semantics, in part because it allows us to assign extremely fine-grained semantic values to expressions, even when those expressions are empty. On the other hand, the de re reading yields a theory that is fully relational, and issues in truth-conditions. The resulting theories are related—and compatible—in that they are expressed by two different readings of the very same semantic vocabulary, and plausibly, the distinction between these two readings is one of scope. (shrink)

In identifying that the 'essential tension' is the balance between conservative and innovative approaches in the development of knowledge - tried-and tested or new directions - Kuhn pointed out that these two attitudes are both appropriate. This study adds to this picture the social and psychological dynamics that underpin any such balancing.

Conceptual Foundations of Quantum Mechanics provides a detailed view of the conceptual foundations and problems of quantum physics, and a clear and comprehensive account of the fundamental physical implications of the quantum formalism. This book deals with nonseparability, hidden variable theories, measurement theories and several related problems. Mathematical arguments are presented with an emphasis on simple but adequately representative cases. The conclusion incorporates a description of a set of relationships and concepts that could compose a legitimate view of the world.

Philosophers often call emotions appropriate or inappropriate. What is meant by such talk? In one sense, explicated in this paper, to call an emotion appropriate is to say that the emotion is fitting: it accurately presents its object as having certain evaluative features. For instance, envy might be thought appropriate when one's rival has something good which one lacks. But someone might grant that a circumstance has these features, yet deny that envy is appropriate, on the grounds that it is (...) wrong to be envious. These two senses of `appropriate' have much less in common than philosophers have supposed. Indeed, the distinction between propriety and correctness is crucial to understanding the distinctive role of the emotions in ethics. We argue here that an emotion can be fitting despite being wrong to feel, and that various philosophical arguments are guilty of a systematic error which we term the moralistic fallacy. (shrink)

When surveying recent philosophical work on the nature and status of collective intentionality and we-intentions, it is striking how much effort is spent on analysing the structure of joint action and on establishing whether or not the intention to, say, go for a walk or paint a house together is reducible to some form of I-intentionality. Much less work has been devoted to an analysis of shared affects and emotions. This is regrettable, not only because emotional sharing in all likelihood (...) is developmentally prior to and logically more basic than joint action, but also because it might constitute a way of being together with others, which we need to study if we wish to better understand the nature of the we. In the present contribution, my primary aim will be to offer an answer to the following question: does the we-experience, the experience of being part of a we, presuppose, precede, preserve, or abolish the difference between self- and other-experience? In pursuing this task, I will take a closer look at emotional sharing and draw on resources that are too frequently ignored in current social ontology, namely insights found in classical phenomenology and in contemporary research on social cognition. (shrink)

We are immersed within an odorous sea of chemical currents that we parse into individual odors with complex structures. Odors have been posited as determined by the structural relation between the molecules that compose the chemical compounds and their interactions with the receptor site. But, naturally occurring smells are parsed from gaseous odor plumes. To give a comprehensive account of the nature of odors the chemosciences must account for these large distributed entities as well. We offer a focused review of (...) what is known about the perception of odor plumes for olfactory navigation and tracking, which we then connect to what is known about the role odorants play as properties of the plume in determining odor identity with respect to odor quality. We end by motivating our central claim that more research needs to be conducted on the role that odorants play within the odor plume in determining odor identity. (shrink)

Abstract – In this paper I reconstruct the nature, origins and survivals of the divide between ‘analytic’ and ‘continental’ tradition—the famous dualism which affected the development of philosophy in the second half of the XX century. I also present a theory of it, stressing that its intra-philosophical causes are to be found in the mutual resistance between critical (transcendental) and semantic (logical) approaches in philosophy. I conclude by noting that good philosophers (more or less knowingly) are and have always been (...) sensitive to the transcendental and logical aspects of the philosophical work. (shrink)

Nelson Goodman's distinction between autographic and allographic arts is appealing, we suggest, because it promises to resolve several prima facie puzzles. We consider and rebut a recent argument that alleges that digital images explode the autographic/allographic distinction. Regardless, there is another familiar problem with the distinction, especially as Goodman formulates it: it seems to entirely ignore an important sense in which all artworks are historical. We note in reply that some artworks can be considered both as historical products and as (...) formal structures. Talk about such works is ambiguous between the two conceptions. This allows us to recover Goodman's distinction: art forms that are ambiguous in this way are allographic. With that formulation settled, we argue that digital images are allographic. We conclude by considering the objection that digital photographs, unlike other digital images, would count as autographic by our criterion; we reply that this points to the vexed nature of photography rather than any problem with the distinction. (shrink)

First, The doctrine of naturalism, That reality is spatio-Temporal, Is defended. Second, The doctrine of materialism or physicalism, That this spatio-Temporal reality involves nothing but the entities of physics working according to the principles of physics, Is defended. Third, It is argued that these doctrines do not constitute a "first philosophy." a satisfactory first philosophy should recognize universals, In the form of instantiated properties and relations. Laws of nature are constituted by relations between universals. What universals there are, And what (...) relations hold between them, Must be discovered "a posteriori" by scientific investigation. (shrink)

According to a widespread view in metaphysics and philosophy of science, all explanations involve relations of ontic dependence between the items appearing in the explanandum and the items appearing in the explanans. I argue that a family of mathematical cases, which I call “viewing-as explanations”, are incompatible with the Dependence Thesis. These cases, I claim, feature genuine explanations that aren’t supported by ontic dependence relations. Hence the thesis isn’t true in general. The first part of the paper defends this claim (...) and discusses its significance. The second part of the paper considers whether viewing-as explanations occur in the empirical sciences, focusing on the case of so-called fictional models. It’s sometimes suggested that fictional models can be explanatory even though they fail to represent actual worldly dependence relations. Whether or not such models explain, I suggest, depends on whether we think scientific explanations necessarily give information relevant to intervention and control. Finally, I argue that counterfactual approaches to explanation also have trouble accommodating viewing-as cases. (shrink)

Husserl und die transzendentale Intersubjektivität analyses the transcendental relevance of intersubjectivity, and argues that an intersubjective transformation of transcendental philosophy can already be found in phenomenology, especially in Husserl. Husserl eventually came to believe that an analysis of transcendental subjectivity was a conditio sine qua non for a phenomenological philosophy. Drawing on both published and unpublished manuscripts the book examines his reasons for this conviction and delivers a detailed analysis of his radical and complex concept of intersubjectivity, showing that precisely (...) his reflections on transcendental intersubjectivity are capable of clarifying his phenomenological core-concepts, thus making possible a new understanding of his philosophy. Against this background the book then attempts to establish to what extent the phenomenological approach to intersubjectivity can contribute to the current discussions of intersubjectivity. This is achieved through a systematic confrontation with the language-pragmatical positions of Apel and Habermas. Die Abhandlung untersucht die transzendentale Relevanz der Intersubjektivität und zeigt, daß eine intersubjektive Transformation der Transzendentalphilosophie schon innerhalb der Phänomenologie - besonders der Husserlschen - zu finden ist. Husserl gelangte zu der Auffassung, daß eine Analyse und Einbeziehung der transzendentalen Intersubjektivität als conditio sine qua non für eine phänomenologische Philosophie zu betrachten sei. Die Gründe, die Husserl zu dieser Überzeugung führten, werden herausgearbeitet. Dabei weist die Analyse des radikalen und komplexen Begriffs der Intersubjektivität auf, daß erst seine Überlegungen zur transzendentalen Intersubjektivität viele phänomenologische Grundbegriffe ins rechte Licht stellen können und darüber hinaus ein neues Grundverständnis seiner Phänomenologie ermöglichen. Vor diesem Hintergrund wird die Frage, inwieweit die Phänomenologie zur gegenwärtigen Intersubjektivitätsdiskussion beitragen kann, durch eine systematische Auseinandersetzung mit der sprachpragmatischen Intersubjektivitätstheorie von Apel und Habermas beantwortet. (shrink)

Dispositions are essential to our understanding of the world. IDispositions: A Debate is an extended dialogue between three distinguished philosophers - D.M. Armstrong, C.B. Martin and U.T. Place - on the many problems associated with dispositions, which reveals their own distinctive accounts of the nature of dispositions. These are then linked to other issues such as the nature of mind, matter, universals, existence, laws of nature and causation.

'Why did the window break when it was hit by the stone? Because the window is brittle and the stone is hard; hardness and brittleness are powers, dispositional properties or dispositions.' Dispositions are essential to our understanding of the world. This book is a record of the debate on the nature of dispositions between three distinguished philosophers - D. M. Armstrong, C. B. Martin and U. T. Place - who have been thinking about dispositions all their working lives. Their distinctive (...) accounts cover many of the issues surrounding dispositions such as the nature of mind, matter, universals, existence, laws of nature and causation. Dispositions illuminates this central topic in analytic philosophy and at the same time highlights deeper concerns of metaphysics. (shrink)

It is argued that it is possible that all properties are categorical, contrary to the arguments of Franklin that there must be dispositionality "all the way down". The tasks for which dispositionality is alleged to be needed can be fulfilled by laws of nature, which are categorical relations between universals.

This paper argues that professionals who make boundary-related decisions should be guided by relationship-based practice. In our roles as service users and professionals, drawing from our lived experiences of professional relationships, we argue we need to move away from distance-based practice. This includes understanding the boundary stories and narratives that exist for all of us – including the people we support, other professionals, as well as the organisations and systems within which we work. When we are dealing with professional boundary (...) issues, we should centre relationship-building skills that are central to many other aspects of our work. Skills that foster relationships at all levels – between professionals, service users, and services – need to be revalued. Our final recommendation is to create, develop, and foster safer spaces within and outside of organisations, as well as inter-professionally, for the discussion and exploration of boundary-related issues and practice. We are interested in hearing from those with experiences of being marginalised by boundaries so that they can inform a reshaping of our collective ideas around boundary related practices. To foster relationship-based practices in organisations, we have outlined several recommendations here; however, we recognize that these do not go far enough, and that collective action is needed to inform systemic change. (shrink)

The problem of truth in fiction concerns how to tell whether a given proposition is true in a given fiction. Thus far, the nearly universal consensus has been that some propositions are ‘implicitly true’ in some fictions: such propositions are not expressed by any explicit statements in the relevant work, but are nevertheless held to be true in those works on the basis of some other set of criteria. I call this family of views ‘implicitism’. I argue that implicitism faces (...) serious problems, whereas the opposite view is much more plausible than has previously been thought. After mounting a limited defence of explicitism, I explore a difficult problem for the view and discuss some possible responses. (shrink)

There is good reason to think that, in every case of perceptual consciousness, there is something of which we are conscious; but there is also good reason to think that, in some cases of perceptual consciousness—for instance, hallucinations—there is nothing of which we are conscious. This paper resolves this inconsistency—which we call the presentation problem—by (a) arguing that ‘conscious of’ and related expressions function as intensional transitive verbs and (b) defending a particular semantic approach to such verbs, on which they (...) have readings that lack direct objects or themes. The paper further argues that this approach serves not only as a linguistic proposal about the semantics of ‘conscious of’, but also as a proposal about the metaphysics of conscious states. (shrink)

A three-valued propositional logic is presented, within which the three values are read as ?true?, ?false? and ?nonsense?. A three-valued extended functional calculus, unrestricted by the theory of types, is then developed. Within the latter system, Bochvar analyzes the Russell paradox and the Grelling-Weyl paradox, formally demonstrating the meaninglessness of both.

Sentimentalist theories in ethics treat evaluative judgments as somehow dependent on human emotional capacities. While the precise nature of this dependence varies, the general idea is that evaluative concepts are to be understood by way of more basic emotional reactions. Part of the task of distinguishing between the concepts that sentimentalism proposes to explicate, then, is to identify a suitably wide range of associated emotions. In this paper, we attempt to deal with an important obstacle to such views, which arises (...) from the dominant tradition in the philosophy of emotion. We will be attempting to steer a middle course between the traditional view and some recent, empirically-minded criticism. (shrink)

One of the traditional ways mathematical ideas and even new areas of mathematics are created is from experiments. One of the best-known examples is that of the Fermat hypothesis, which was conjectured by Fermat in his attempts to find integer solutions for the famous Fermat equation. This hypothesis led to the creation of a whole field of knowledge, but it was proved only after several hundred years. This book, based on the author's lectures, presents several new directions of mathematical research. (...) All of these directions are based on numerical experiments conducted by the author, which led to new hypotheses that currently remain open, i.e., are neither proved nor disproved. The hypotheses range from geometry and topology (statistics of plane curves and smooth functions) to combinatorics (combinatorial complexity and random permutations) to algebra and number theory (continuous fractions and Galois groups). For each subject, the author describes the problem and presents numerical results that led him to a particular conjecture. In the majority of cases there is an indication of how the readers can approach the formulated conjectures (at least by conducting more numerical experiments). Written in Arnold's unique style, the book is intended for a wide range of mathematicians, from high school students interested in exploring unusual areas of mathematics on their own, to college and graduate students, to researchers interested in gaining a new, somewhat nontraditional perspective on doing mathematics. In the interest of fostering a greater awareness and appreciation of mathematics and its connections to other disciplines and everyday life, MSRI and the AMS are publishing books in the Mathematical Circles Library series as a service to young people, their parents and teachers, and the mathematics profession. Titles in this series are co-published with the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (MSRI). (shrink)

This book introduces the reader to relevant logic and provides the subject with a philosophical interpretation. The defining feature of relevant logic is that it forces the premises of an argument to be really used in deriving its conclusion. The logic is placed in the context of possible world semantics and situation semantics, which are then applied to provide an understanding of the various logical particles and natural language conditionals. The book ends by examining various applications of relevant logic and (...) presenting some interesting open problems. It will be of interest to a range of readers including advanced students of logic, philosophical and mathematical logicians, and computer scientists. (shrink)

Deductive inference is usually regarded as being “tautological” or “analytical”: the information conveyed by the conclusion is contained in the information conveyed by the premises. This idea, however, clashes with the undecidability of first-order logic and with the (likely) intractability of Boolean logic. In this article, we address the problem both from the semantic and the proof-theoretical point of view. We propose a hierarchy of propositional logics that are all tractable (i.e. decidable in polynomial time), although by means of growing (...) computational resources, and converge towards classical propositional logic. The underlying claim is that this hierarchy can be used to represent increasing levels of “depth” or “informativeness” of Boolean reasoning. Special attention is paid to the most basic logic in this hierarchy, the pure “intelim logic”, which satisfies all the requirements of a natural deduction system (allowing both introduction and elimination rules for each logical operator) while admitting of a feasible (quadratic) decision procedure. We argue that this logic is “analytic” in a particularly strict sense, in that it rules out any use of “virtual information”, which is chiefly responsible for the combinatorial explosion of standard classical systems. As a result, analyticity and tractability are reconciled and growing degrees of computational complexity are associated with the depth at which the use of virtual information is allowed. (shrink)

It has been claimed that the ability to remember the past and the ability to project oneself into the future are intimately related. We sought support for this proposition by examining whether individual differences in dimensions that have been shown to affect memory for past events similarly influence the experience of projecting oneself into the future. We found that individuals with a higher capacity for visual imagery experienced more visual and other sensory details both when remembering past events and when (...) imagining future events. In addition, individuals who habitually use suppression to regulate their emotions experienced fewer sensory, contextual, and emotional details when representing both past and future events, while the use of reappraisal had no effect on either kind of events. These findings are consistent with the view that mental time travel into the past and into the future relies on similar mechanisms. (shrink)

This chapter explores the debate between contemporary projectivists or expressivists, and the advocates of sensibility theory. Both positions are best viewed as forms of sentimentalism — the theory that evaluative concepts must be explicated by appeal to the sentiments. It argues that the sophisticated interpretation of such notions as “true” and “objective” that are offered by defenders of these competing views ultimately undermines the significance of their meta-ethical disputes over “cognitivism” and “realism” about value. Their fundamental disagreement lies in moral (...) psychology; it concerns how best to understand the emotions to which sentimentalist theories must appeal. (shrink)

The development of transplantation technology increasingly places before society a multitude of diverse, complex ethical and legal problems. The subject is the more complex because of the various divergent interests involved. There are the interests of the donor of organs, who has a right to protection of his legal position, and those of the patient in need of an often lifesaving organ. There are also the interests of the donor’s relatives, after his death, and those of the transplantation surgeons. The (...) international dimension of transplantation technology makes the picture even more complicated. Though this article is devoted to the European situation, the problems are similar all over the world. (shrink)

The development of transplantation technology increasingly places before society a multitude of diverse, complex ethical and legal problems. The subject is the more complex because of the various divergent interests involved. There are the interests of the donor of organs, who has a right to protection of his legal position, and those of the patient in need of an often lifesaving organ. There are also the interests of the donor’s relatives, after his death, and those of the transplantation surgeons. The (...) international dimension of transplantation technology makes the picture even more complicated. Though this article is devoted to the European situation, the problems are similar all over the world. (shrink)

Many writers in various fields--philosophy, religion, literature, and psychology--believe that the question of the meaning of life is one of the most significant problems that an individual faces. In The Meaning of Life, Second Edition, E.D. Klemke collects some of the best writings on this topic, primarily works by philosophers but also selections from literary figures and religious thinkers. The twenty-seven cogent, readable essays are organized around three different perspectives on the meaning of life. In Part I, the readings assert (...) and defend the theistic view that without the existence of God--or faith in God--life has no significance or purpose. In Part II the selections deny this thesis, defending instead the humanistic alternative--that life has or can have meaning and worth without any theistic beliefs or commitment. In the final group of readings, contributors ask if the question of the meaning of life is in itself legitimate and significant. The volume also includes an introduction by the editor and a selected bibliography. This new edition adds essays by A. J. Ayer, Hazel Barnes, William Lane Craig, Owen Flanagan, Antony Flew, Thomas Nagel, Kai Nielsen, Philip L. Quinn, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Walter T. Stace. The only anthology of its kind, The Meaning of Life, Second Edition, is ideal for courses in introduction to philosophy and human nature. It also provides an accessible and stimulating introduction to the subject for general readers. (shrink)